


deep sea diver

by bloodsugarlove



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Drinking, Drunkenness, F/F, Grief/Mourning, Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-23
Updated: 2017-05-23
Packaged: 2018-11-04 00:02:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10978152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bloodsugarlove/pseuds/bloodsugarlove
Summary: A drunk and grieving Hermione runs away from her own life and into someone else's. Things get strange.





	1. in the burrow

**Author's Note:**

> this is incomplete, and an AU. pansy appears in chapter two. lyrics are from grizzly bear's Deep Sea Diver.
> 
> past hermione/ron, hermione/pansy. 
> 
> i don't know quite what else to put here. please forgive my laziness when it comes to format. v short chapters.

_I’m a deep sea diver with my fins  
& underneath your current I do swim_

 

Harry still won’t sleep through the night. 

He drinks coffee and does crossword puzzles, a habit that puzzles Hermione, who can’t remember whether he liked either before. He disappears for hours and hours at a time, too, until Hermione can’t recall the last place she caught a glimpse: the stairs, out in the garden, propped up against the head of Ron’s bed or sitting with the twins in the grass. 

Sometimes it seems he can’t show himself fully, as though he were a unicorn or some other mythical beast. He might as well be one, for what they’re saying in the Prophet. 

Not that Hermione could quote it for you, if she tried. 

She can’t remember if she dreamt the article, or the colors of the photograph. 

Lately, she can’t remember a lot of things. 

Ginny says one sentence, and it’s out the other ear. Every meal, every seating at the table blends together: not talking to Harry about what happened, avoiding the subject with everyone else, and very firm smiling. Words in books now are composed of hints, whispery little ghosts, so Hermione swallows them and understands but cannot spit them out whole again or stitch them into meaning. She isn’t sure when she last wrote anyone, or which postcard or bit of stationary in her drawer is whose. 

There was a time, deep in a quiet corner of her mind, when she felt the power of her intellect, the brilliance of her logic, as if they were tangible things – as if they were tools that could be grasped, or rungs of a ladder. Her memory was like a snapping fish, glittering iron teeth. Recall was a rubber band, quick and sharp against even the softest skin. 

Now she is very quiet or very loud, no in between, nothing but extremes. It’s like walking underwater or on a tightrope all the time, day and night. Soon time does pass and there are two weeks to go until she swims back to shore, hauls herself back onto the dock. Two weeks till reporting back at Hogwarts, and Hermione isn’t sure she was really the one who accepted the reenrollment. She isn’t sure she knows the way back anymore. 

The nurse at St. Mungo’s said all of this would be over by now. 

 

*** 

One day, a Tuesday comes. 

The Tuesday, everyone’s been counting down, and Seamus and Dean are late to the Burrow. They come up the walk slowly, talking to each other, carrying twin carpet bags. It’s 11am. 

Hermione watches them from a window upstairs. She doesn’t announce their arrival, doesn’t move a muscle, even when the door flies open and Ginny is hugging them close and Mrs. Weasley calls out excitedly. Not even when Harry and his messy dark head emerge and she can hear Seamus crowing, “Potter! Been thinking of you.” 

_Thinking of you._

Later he says: “Lovely, Mrs. Weasley. That’s brilliant cooking.” 

Nice manners sometimes, Seamus. 

Hermione has quaint memories of those same polite fingers. _Now_ they clutch fork and knife with delicacy, _then_ they smashed someone’s teeth in like piano keys, thumbed through the pockets of a dead man or several. 

Hermione can’t remember the faces. 

_Thinking of you._

Ginny snorts when her mother blushes, and Harry says something, and Seamus says something. He grins down into his plate and then up at Dean, as if sharing a private joke.  
Harry smirks along. There is the sound of chair legs against the tile. 

So Hermione helps Molly straighten up, and she chatters, talks, on and on about going back to school and all those other things she’ll be doing, trying – you know – so many brilliant things. And everyone looks at her strangely after a while, but she tries to think she’s helping them consider the future, conceptualize it, even if they don’t realize the importance of such exercises right now. 

_Visualization._ There is a faraway time when things are all right, very clean and pleasant, and Hermione feels like Hermione and everything makes sense. Even all the empty spaces make sense, including the empty Ronnish hole between herself and Harry, a space that grows deeper and taller and lankier, more human by the day. 

X does not have to equal x, if x is an illusion. X is x else if x equals y. X2. Y else? 

✳

When Mr. and Mrs. Weasley go to bed, everyone -- _everyone_ \-- crowds into Ginny’s room. They’re hushing eachother and shh-ing and clutching at sleeves, hissing for quiet, laughing under their warm breaths. 

Harry’s there, sitting quietly in the ancient rocker, gliding one way and then the other. George and Fred snicker in too-matching pajamas. Seamus and Dean, of course, reveal bottles of gin and Irish whisky and mixers and stout dark beer the color of falling asleep. 

Hermione doesn’t drink, not usually, but Dean holds something out and then it’s slipping down her throat anyway. _Water, water everywhere_. In an alternate universe, she’s for sure shaking her head _no_ with grace, amusement; instead, this Hermione swallows until some undefined time passes and from one moment to the next she awakens again. 

Everyone is talking, lit up and brightened by the alcohol and cards. She listens to their voices and their jokes, and she watches, feels herself spinning in circles, a spiral of dumb fuzzy letters. 

“Everyone,” she announces. 

Ginny laughs. “Who’s gotten Hermione _smashed_?” 

More laughter. 

“Hermione?” Harry asks tentatively. 

She realizes in that moment that there are tears in her eyes, maybe slightly rolling down a cheek, and she lurches up onto her feet and out the door. 

Once in the hallway she rests her back against the wall, slapping both hands over her mouth to keep from talking to someone who isn’t there. Then she puts them over her ears. 

_I don’t want to hear_. No. 

Not anyone speaking, not voices discussing the truth, not anyone saying Ron’s name in a hushed little syllable like you-know-who-died-young. 

But it’s thinking of Ron that gets her back into her room, moving with determination through the blur of the salt. And when Seamus – not Ginny, not Harry – knocks on her door, the logic of the sad new world presents itself to her like this: 

“What’re you doing, love? Join us again?” 

“I don’t think so. Not tonight.” 

He sounds low and amused, and Hermione can’t see much in the dark: just the outline of his head, blondish and mussed, the little glinting pieces that must be his eyes. She can’t recall if they’re blue or green. 

“All right,” he confirms. “But everyone knows why. He was a good one, a good friend. …Want to know something? Sometimes you just have to dive straight in, when there’s that hole in things.” 

She only nods again, and he sees it, shifts his weight from one foot to another. He takes her by the elbow and she lets him lead her down the hall again, wobbling like a lamb. 

“Ginny’s room isn’t this way,” Hermione informs him, when they’ve gone too far. It’s easy to remember because the hall only goes north and south. _Half of a compass._ West into the garden, east into the street that leads nowhere quickly. 

“I’m not taking you to Ginny’s room. I’m throwing you down a different hole.” 

Then the world shifts and bends and pulls her by the navel, like a string. Her head spins and her brain is blood-colored air but Hermione screams aloud, exhilarated, and lands on both feet.


	2. in the nightclub

_A baker’s dozen, thirteen pearls_  
_& when I try them on my toes do curl_

 

Seamus waggles the portkey at her: a bit of silver, perhaps a bottle opener.

 _That was incredibly dangerous_ , she would like to chide, but she’s quiet as she takes in the street, the glow of windows and moon. Seamus pushes her, laughs gaily over his shoulder. He’s leading her through the new darkness, a hot tomb pulsing and pounding with music, down in the earth with all the bodies, up in the air with the notes. There are sliding sounds, vocals and lights the color of candy, frost. A rainbow of teardrops like melting amber.

Somehow there is another drink in her hand and the nothing in her chest grows, keeps growing, till Hermione knows the way to move to the songs. She’s never heard music out loud like this before. She can’t remember the kind of spellwork that would make the ceiling glow like that, or the liquid mist cold but _so warm_ , and stay stuck in its glass no matter how she moves or how thickly the waves in her head start to churn.

She hasn’t been around this many people for weeks, not since going to stay at the Burrow. They’re everywhere, talking and dancing and laughing and touching eachother -- or wanting to touch -- leering at eachother across spaces and over the top of the bar. _Where’s Seamus?_ She isn’t dressed properly. Her shoes are too practical, scuffed at the toes.

Hermione takes in enough of sweet something in the glass and transcends. She melts into a separate plane of vodka and shining air. She imagines looking down at herself, her mane of coarse hair, and realizes that really she’s just standing on the periphery, rocking back and forth like a strange animal, and Seamus has taken her somewhere she never wanted to go without asking, and she can’t even hear him when he leans in to talk to her now. When a light the shape of a star hits him between the eyes it shines up all the concern in them, and he tries to touch her face but she’s scared because this is not a hole, it’s a den—

And Ron will never be here, would never be here—

He wouldn’t recognize her at all.

So Hermione cries. Hermione puts her head down on the bar that has materialized before her and cries and Seamus definitely says: “Jesus. This was a mistake.”

She agrees, voice shrill over the music.

“Calm down,” he tells her firmly, resting his hand on her back “It’s all right. I’ll just get you home.”

And she opens her mouth to say _how dare you_ something or other (“ _I should be in bed, I should be out to sea_ ”) but someone else speaks first.

 

******

 

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

The voice belongs to someone in a dress with a dark hood. A prim mouth with shaped red lips moves in a soft-chinned, glimmering face. Hermione doesn’t remember it, but it strikes her as something she knows. Little hairs stand up. She can’t see the person’s eyes -- can’t see half their face, really -- but perhaps in a moment she won’t need to.

Seamus just sort of gapes, shakes his head a little. “I dunno, she’s just upset. We lost R-“

“Don’t care. Why don’t you get your hands off her? Why’s she crying like that?”

“What?”

“Get your hands off her, Finnigan,” the woman repeats. She moves in a familiar, practiced way, as if to imply a wand ready to draw. Maybe a knife. She makes a little noise, expelling air through her teeth.

“I think you’ve got it wrong,” Seamus is saying, but by then people have noticed what’s happening, and then the bartender is coming out and Seamus puts his hands up, still flustered over explanations. Hermione stands up to follow him as he’s expelled, but the crowd is crushing and a hand grabs at her sleeve before she can get very far.

“Why are you here?” Pansy Parkinson asks, pushing back her hood. “God, you look _ghastly_.”

Hermione feels the prickle of old annoyance.

“Don’t worry, I’m leaving,” she spits, wiping her eyes with the back of a hand. “I never wanted to come here… now. In the first place.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” says Pansy, who looks older now, sharper, even in this blur and wandering light. She’s grown into her face. “You sound like a child. You’re so bloody _drunk_ , Granger. I can’t believe they let you in here.”

Hermione grumbles something else in return, but she _is_ drunk – she is – and she almost wants to just sit on the floor and cry again. Maybe someone could get her a book of cocktail ingredients to study, center the sway of her neural knit. _Not that I study well anymore._ Not that everything doesn’t just spill out, like wasted potion.

“Sit down,” Pansy commands, half-pushing Hermione onto a stool. “Salazar, you’re _covered in beer_. I can’t fucking believe I’m seeing this.”

“Seamus said I should… Oh, I can’t remember. We were at--”

“Ugh, _spare_ me. I can’t believe they let _him_ in here, either. It’s supposed to be exclusive.”

Hermione squints.

“You really do look a fright,” Pansy continues. “What, are they not keeping you well anymore? Brightest witch of your age? You look like someone’s been storing you in an attic.”

She reaches out a hand so quickly when Hermione tries to stand up and walk away. It’s like a cat’s paw. Her eyes are big, too, framed with spidery lashes. _I forgot they were so dark, when I pictured them before. I remembered them the color of Malfoy’s._

“Look, I heard about your boyfriend. It’s really sad.”

Hermione pulls her sleeve out of Pansy’s fingers. “I’ve… I don’t need….”

This makes Pansy laugh. _I remember_ that _sound_. “Mmm, my pity? You don’t need my pity? Well, I don’t pity you.”

“Your friends aren’t here either,” Hermione slurs. She feels angry for the first time in ages, not just empty: angry and thirsty and itchy with neglect, like a dull blade that should be cutting something in pieces.

Pansy just sort of tuts in that silly poshy way, adjusting herself on her stool like a spider. One of her legs is touching Hermione’s. She checks her makeup in a compact shaped like the soft curve of a cranium, and snaps it shut when Hermione moves to leave again.

“Do you want to see where my friends are?” she asks, in a clip.

“Excuse me?”

“You have nowhere else to go. Admit it. You couldn’t apparate if you wanted to, brightest _drunkest_ witch.”

There is a truth there. Hermione hadn’t considered how she would get home. She wonders if Seamus is waiting for her outside, if he’s gone back to the Burrow to fetch someone to help bring her home. _Harry, maybe._

What would Harry do, then? How would he look, tugged out of his pajamas and into the first available dirty jumper and plimsolls?

_Sometimes you just have to dive right in, when there’s a hole in things._

So Hermione follows Pansy into the bathroom.

“Can’t bring you with me looking like this, if Daphne’s there.” She pulls and prods, soothes clothing with the pads of her hands, her crooked thin fingers. She tries for a moment to slip them into Hermione’s hair and comb through, but thinks better of it.

“I have a few good serums for _that_.” Pansy waves off the mess of brown curls, distracted. She’s adjusting herself in the mirror, jutting out her bony chest, gazing at the line of her jaw when she holds it high in the cold light.

Hermione definitely didn’t remember all those freckles.

Then again, she’d never seen very far beyond the sharpness of Pansy’s voice before, or the stupid slithering shame of her laughter. In a place like this, at once quiet and booming with echoes and bass like a buried giant, it’s all backward.

Pansy takes a deep pull from a silver flask, and when she catches Hermione’s eyes in the mirror she nearly spits, laughing. “Oh my god, you look like a fucking ghost.”


	3. in the house

_Cos you got everything that I want_   
_A car, a house and a dog  
You got everything that I want _

Pansy lives in a house by the ocean. 

Hermione has no idea where they are at first – she can hear the waves, smell the salt and something else, but her mind is like a Newton’s Cradle now, swinging and bashing into itself. 

Yeah, she feels _odd_ , standing on the polished stones of the ledge that constitutes a porch: its edges are so deliberately round, worked by hand. There’s a beautiful iron lantern, and beautiful iron in the smooth glass windows of the perfect little cottage, walls white like polished bone in the night. It must have cost a fortune.

“I know, it’s _charming_ ,” says Pansy, somewhat deprecatingly. She’s fidgeting near the door – undoing and redoing wards? – and looks at Hermione with something like impatience. “My family’s summer home is _so_ much nicer. We have pear trees.” 

Hermione isn’t sure of this as a qualifier, but she likes pears well enough. _Plums?_

“You need water,” Pansy goes on, as they cross the threshold. Her fingers are pulling at Hermione’s sleeve again. “Or pepper-up? Daphne takes so much space with potions she’d never miss if we knicked one, the dodo.” 

Then she sings out: “… Daphne?” 

The house is quiet. 

“Astoria?” 

Nothing. 

“Perfect, they’ll just be stomping in at six in the morning again,” Pansy sniffs. “This household is entirely lawless. We’re overrun with savages.” 

“It’s… dark in here.” 

Pansy turns to Hermione again then, nearly as if really looking at her for the first time: someone just now appearing on stage, slouching in the spotlight like the drunk she is. She grins widely, like an evil cat – but self-conscious, too, as if this really is some kind of show. Or is that only a projection? 

She’s laughing, too. A little titter. 

“Oh, stop,” Hermione huffs, incensed. The sound feels like hallways again, and whispering behind hands, jokes about know-it-alls. Or did they say worse things, actually? It’s difficult to recall. 

“Here, _I_ know what we’ll do.” 

Pansy snaps her fingers, floods the space with the glow of a forest of candles. They hang like funny icicles in the air, white and grey and lavender. Hermione can see the room now, too, shaped like an egg and veering off into a hallway, a gilded doorway. Everything stands like a museum in the flickering golden light: heavy tapestries, luxurious furniture, ornate arrangements of objects and glass flowers and magical implements, books with rich bindings all lined up in rows. It seems selected, put together by some ghostly, impersonal touch – the kind Hermione can always sense in places like these, and always dislikes. Even now. _A state of swaying, no sea legs._ Her body still feels empty, but rolls now with something like nausea. 

It’s beautiful here anyway, and so quiet. 

“Oh _drunkest witch_ ,” Pansy leers playfully(?). “Come with me.” 

***** 

“I think it’s wearing off,” says Hermione, in the bedroom. 

“What?” 

“…The alcosubstances.” 

At that, Pansy’s raven head pops out of the closet’s maw. “I think not.” 

She eyes Hermione for a long moment, as if taking measurements in her head: Hermione, like a dirty elf child in the midst of so much casual finery, baubles, perfume air. She is far too sour and plain, but she used to know the kinds of spells that would keep that needling ocean wind from between the cracks, make it soft and cozy and lovely like it should be in this oyster-room. She can’t recall them now. Not with Pansy laughing sometimes, grumbling to herself between fine, shimmering pieces of cloth and gauze. 

She makes a little sound of effort and emerges from the closet at last, tossing a pile of lovely things onto the four-poster. 

“There we are. I bet half of this won’t even fit you.” 

Hermione eyes the luscious fabrics, intrigued, but opens her mouth to object. 

“Shhh.” 

“I thought you said I… Water? Or even--”

“You’re fine,” Pansy purrs. “Really, you just need a little wine.” 

She sways a little bit when she bends at the waist, straightens with something velvety and black in hand. That’s when Hermione realizes she’s drunk, too. 

 

*****

Pansy looks like an Ophelia. She looks warm, with suffering blood. She has a face of blurry make-up; it’s snake-eyed, honeyed. She’s like a Truth who fell asleep in some well of champagne, then never bothered to climb out. She dances to un-hearable music. When Hermione has her back turned, studying the titles on a low corner bookcase, she puts on an enchanted French record. It spins in midair. Pansy spins too, but her hair stays perfect, but her legs are dizzying. 

Hermione spins. 

They trip around in their shoes and scuff up the expensive carpet. When Pansy leans up against her for balance, the top of her head smells like something deeply sweet, maybe dirt-like. Truth who fell asleep in a well of champagne, then let everyone bury her to ferment. 

“Can we fix you now?” Pansy asks, offers a goblet of wine Hermione hadn’t noticed her pour. Or did she simply see and not remember? There’s an open bottle on the floor. There are mundane and ageless versions of magic that you don’t speak, that you don’t see. 

“Can we fix you now?” she repeats. Then she tsks again, still wobbly with inertia from dancing and flinging herself about. The velvety black thing is a little slip of a dress, now lying there on the bed like a girl. 

Hermione doesn’t know what to say, doesn’t say anything, but when she puts the rim of the drink to her mouth, Pansy moves to undo her shirt. Her fingernails are sharp. She undoes all the buttons so efficiently, and Hermione stands there, breathing very very softly in the coldish air, feeling very very softly against it with the flesh of her chest. It seems to her that she’s moving without meaning to, but she’s standing still. She’s worried she’ll move too much. 

“Ugh, look at your _brassiere_ ,” says Pansy, spitting the word in mockery. “This has to be older than I am.”

And she laughs, but she slips the tip of a finger under the wire. It’s cold and sharp. 

“Excuse you,” Hermione interrupts. 

Pansy says nothing. Her lip has a determined sheen. She pulls at the fabric of the shirt till it falls, and moves to the button of Hermione’s slacks. Hermione grasps at the top of her white hand – but not to stop her, maybe. To stop her? Maybe. The heel of Pansy’s hand presses firmly into the warmth between Hermione’s legs, and all of this is suddenly funny to her. She cackles like being hit with a punch-line, tossing glossy black hair; then she takes the goblet from Hermione and wanders over to the bed to sit. 

“God, you’re so predictable,” she complains. Her mouth glistens newly with wine. 

“I’m…” Hermione crosses her arms, defensive. Chilly. “So _inebriated._ ” 

“Well, what am I to do about it?” 

They look at each other.

Pansy smiles half-innocently, slides a hand along the fabric of the black slip, and Hermione walks to her without thinking of it. She doesn’t know what to do once she’s there, looking down at that face, so she gets on her knees. Her mind is a pocket of blank air. Her body throbs. Pansy leans over at once, a split-second decision, and pushes her mouth into the line of Hermione’s lips. She’s hot and vaguely rotten and slippery, berry shine, some teeth. She slips tongue and then rumbles with laughter down in her throat. After they pull apart, she takes the slip and throws it unceremoniously at Hermione’s face. 

“There you go.” 

Hermione is pulling the fabric over her head, and once her mouth is free Pansy pushes the goblet at it. 

“ _There_ you go. And take your fucking clothes off.”


End file.
